Limited government unites groups

A seemingly unusual alliance — a gay conservative group and some tea party leaders — released a letter Monday aimed at igniting a campaign to keep social issues off the Republican agenda.

The letter — from the gay group GOProud and leaders of organizations such as the Tea Party Patriots and the New American Patriots — urges Republicans in the House and Senate to keep their focus on shrinking the government.

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“On behalf of limited-government conservatives everywhere, we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the tea party movement,” the groups said in the letter to presumptive House Speaker John Boehner and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell. “This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue.”

The letter’s 17 signatories range from GOProud’s co-founder and chairman, Christopher Barron — a member of a group encouraging former Vice President Dick Cheney to run for president — to tea party leaders with no particular interest in the gay rights movement. Others include tea party organizers, conservative activists and media personalities from across the country, including radio host Tammy Bruce, bloggers Bruce Carroll, Dan Blatt and Doug Welch and various local coordinators for the Tea Party Patriots and other tea party groups.

“When [the members of the Boston Tea Party] were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren’t arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion,” said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member as well as an Ohio co-coordinator.

King said he signed onto the letter because GOProud seemed to be genuine in pushing for fiscal conservatism and limited government.

“Am I going to be the best man at a same-sex-marriage wedding? That’s not something I necessarily believe in,” said King. “I look at myself as pretty socially conservative. But that’s not what we push through the Tea Party Patriots.”

That indifference is essentially the point of the gay conservative group.

“For almost two years now, the tea party has been laser focused on the size of government,” said Barron, who added that his group and the tea partiers are part of the “leave-me-alone coalition.”

“No one has been talking about social issues — not even the socially conservative candidates who won tea party support,” Barron said.

Economic and social conservatives have sparred for months over what priority to give questions like abortion and gay rights even as conservative energy on issues of debt, taxation and, above all, the size of government fueled the Republican Party’s dramatic recovery since Barack Obama’s election.

And while their agendas often overlap — foes of abortion and Big Government alike opposed the health care overhaul — the small-government impulses of the new conservative grass-roots groups have sometimes come into conflict with the desire of religious conservatives to give the federal government a moral role. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was recently pilloried by social conservative leaders for calling for a “truce” on divisive social issues.